10 Future Healthcare Jobs To Watch

To say that healthcare is changing would be an understatement. Technology is transforming it, and some healthcare jobs may cease to exist in the future. It is exciting to see what kind of new jobs will come about in the future and the training required for the next-generation workforce.

Without a doubt, the jobs are novel, without precedent, and will need extensive training. Being aware of these will be important not just for preparing the workforce, but also to prevent some of these roles from becoming a reality.

Here’s Frost & Sullivan’s take on 10 jobs that are likely to come about in the near future:

Reconstructive Surgery 3D Printing Specialist

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3d printed hip bone

3D printing applications for healthcare have come a long way, from custom orthopedic implants to “organoids” made from living cells for drug testing, and now using live cells for “living tattoos” that detect specific biomarkers in sweat. In the future, we will see burn or accident victims being given new skin (and probably more) that was grown using their cells and 3D printed for use in reconstructive surgery. We will need a new breed of 3D printing technicians who specialize in generating tissues.

Voice Assistant Healthcare Content Specialists

Healthcare stakeholders have already realized the power of using voice-based virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa to support home care needs of seniors for aging-in-place or medication adherence for chronic disease management. While these applications are still evolving and additional applications for healthcare are very likely to be introduced, the virtual assistants are still naïve and not necessarily equipped to handle every query that a user may pose. For example, will telling a virtual assistant that you are depressed trigger additional checks for gauging intensity for suicide risk? Currently, the people behind content are developers, not healthcare specialists, but in the future, as voice assistants evolve to serve additional healthcare areas, domain specialists who can build out the content would be necessary to provide accurate and relevant content.

Robotic Clinical Documentation Scribes

Clinical documentation is a painstaking process; doctors probably spend hours on this, instead of focusing on patients. While a combination of voice recognition, natural language processing and artificial intelligence will automate this task in the future, it will still need a human supervisor to “proofread” and ensure the documentation is accurate, as any mistakes in this crucial process could be detrimental to patient outcomes.

Virtual Hospital Manager

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The stethoscope and smart phone with medical history on the screen.

We are already seeing the rise of virtual hospitals; Mercy Virtual in the US calls itself “a hospital with no beds.” The entire 125,000-square-foot facility has 330 staff members, but patients are all managed virtually via telehealth-based approaches. Very soon, such facilities will need dedicated managers who are well versed in webside manners, ethics and other aspects associated with delivering care virtually.

Precision Medicine Compounding Pharmacist

Future patients will be treated with precision medicine as a norm, making bulk pharmaceutical drugs obsolete, at least for this purpose. Compounding pharmacists will oversee robots that take care of the process, but feed the robots with the right information about the patients based on their genetics and individual characteristics defined by medical imaging and analytics.